RANKING Africa’s most beautiful countries is a hugely controversial affair, as recent attempts to do so proved, not least
because nobody wants to admit they are on the lower rung of the beauty chain, and, obviously, beauty lies in the eye of the beholder.

But
sometimes it seems beholders are more or less in agreement over the regions
where you are likely to find Africa’s most beautiful women. Looking through a few
recent totally unscientific rankings (you can find them
here, here, and here), a few countries keep propping up in the
top slots.
In no particular order, they are:

Ethiopia

Eritrea

Rwanda

Somalia

Egypt

Ghana

If we go
with what the pollsters say, it would seem that the Horn of Africa, North and West Africa beats the rest of the continent in having
the most beautiful women. So how did it happen? Was it just a stroke of luck,
or are there other forces at play, that tend to shape a society into becoming
“more beautiful”? And did beauty play a political, even security, role in societies before these times, when the focus is mostly on its superficial aspects?

We dug up some facts about life in these places over the past
few thousand years, and some common threads begun to emerge that explain “beauty”. So if your country
isn’t on the list, here’s a (half-serious, in typical M&G Africa fashion) guide
on how to make sure, in the next few centuries, you get bragging rights too:

The forest vs. desert people

First, make sure
you have enough food, especially protein—by not living in the rainforest, because what societies in the past - and today still - ate, played a role in the beauty of their women, as it did in the masculinity of its men.

At first
glance, rainforest seem like incredibly abundant places
teeming with all sorts
of plant and animal species. While this may be true, the vast majority of the
natural biodiversity found in rainforests aren’t good for humans to eat.

Because the ecosystem is so plentiful—thus swarming with potential predators—both
plants and animals have to devise ingenious ways to protect themselves from being eaten, so many plants and animals are poisonous.

And because the habitat is so
dense, big animals can’t move around easily, so the forest has much more small
animals—insects, rodents and birds—than big ones.

As a result, and totally
counter-intuitively, rainforests are some of the most
protein-deficient places
on earth, and most people there have to eat all sorts of critters to survive, from
spiders, snails, bats—pretty much any meat they can get their hands on. And
even hunting whatever good creatures there are is a tricky activity because you
could wind up empty handed at the end of a long hunt.

To make
sure you have a steady supply of good, nutritious food, the most energy-efficient way to do
so is to raise grain and keep livestock.

Cereal
grains support much bigger human populations than rainforests ever could, but
Africa’s case was interesting—livestock was domesticated
before people started growing grain crops. Archaeologists reckon the reason is because good quality
wild grain was so abundant in the savannahs of Africa that there was no reason
to settle down and farm. The first cultivated grain was pearl millet, farmed
around 2,000 BC, but cattle have been kept by humans from as early as 5,900 BC.

The result is that pre-industrial semi-arid and/or open grassland countries like Somalia, Eritrea, Egypt, Ethiopia where it was easy to raise larger animals like cattle, allowed those societies more access to proteins that, then, to put it simplistically, allowed their women the nourishment to be “beautiful”, than the ones in the Congo forests.

Another wrinkle in the food story

Still, even if you live in the flat lands and thus can more easily grow grain, that wouldn’t be enough - you must be
able to store the surplus grain. Again, geography helps. The most intensively farmed regions of Africa
have a dry season that allows cereals to dry out and be preserved for lean
times. So Africa’s most food secure regions emerged not in the forests, but in
the flat, relatively well-watered plains.

With a
steady supply of protein and carbohydrates, large, densely populated societies
could emerge, that required the centralisation of power to maintain control. It
is no coincidence that Africa’s
mightiest empires—such as Egypt, Kanem-Bornu,
Songhai, Ghana and Axum—emerged in the flat lands bordering the heat of the
desert, where there was enough water to support agriculture, but also the weather was
dry enough at times to allow grains to dry out. These kinds of lands had enough
grass, and enough room, to support big livestock.

Armies, trade, and beauty

Centralising
power meant that armies had to be raised to maintain power—there was enough
surplus food to feed the soldiers who did not work, and the surpluses could also be
traded for other goods. North Africa was central to the Mediterranean trade,
with cities like Alexandria, Tripoli and Carthage being vital trade hubs.

The
kingdom of Axum in Ethiopia had a powerful navy with
trading links as far as
the Byzantium in southern Europe and India. Somalia had numerous
flourishing trade centres, and the Romans and Greeks believed the source of cinnamon to
have been the Somali peninsula, but in reality, the highly valued product was
brought to Somalia by way of Indian ships.

By colluding with the Indian and
Gulf Arab traders, cinnamon was thus exported to Europe at exorbitantly higher
prices than it would have been, making the cinnamon trade a very profitable
revenue stream, especially for the Somali merchants through whose hands large
quantities were shipped across ancient sea and land routes.

And a whole host of
very wealthy kingdoms emerged on the Sahel in West Africa, including Ghana, Mali
and Kanem-Bornu. The Huffington Post even ranked the legendary Mansa Musa of
Mali as the “
richest man of all time”, worth a staggering $400 billion in
today’s terms after adjusting for inflation. He gave away so much gold during
his pilgrimage to Mecca that the price of gold was depressed, and it took 12
years for gold to recover its value in North Africa and Arabia.

Being
hemmed in by mountains (which might account for Rwanda’s presence in the top Africa beauty league table) or deserts is another trade advantage, as it gave
empires on these frontiers monopoly power over the goods coming from the
interior to the trading centres. In the case of Axum, for example, the
formidable Ethiopian Highlands meant that traders on the Red Sea couldn’t cross
the interior and get the ivory, gold and emeralds that they wanted, leaving the
Axumites to be the middlemen and dictate the terms of trade.

Among other things, this monopoly over commerce, and mercantile trade allowed the circulation of products for grooming. The Africans in the rainforests thus didn’t - and still don’t have - henna, for example.

Cleopatra and strategic beauty

However, this wealth,
centralised power and inequality tend to attract war, insurrection and
instability, as rival groups fight to control or invade and capture resources.

It has been theorised that is where
beauty becomes an advantage as it gives poor families a chance at social
mobility by marrying off their daughters to rich men. Even during war, after the battle has died down, historically the invaders
would rather seize the beautiful girls of the vanquished tribes and marry than kill them.

The case of Cleopatra partly elaborates this power element of beauty. Cleapatra was a famous queen of ancient Egypt. She was beautiful, intelligent and politically astute. She is perhaps more known her
love affairs with two Roman rulers; Julius Caesar (William Shakespeare wrote
about it), and Mark Antony.

To focus on that, however, would be to miss the bigger picture. When
Caesar came Egypt he helped her regain her throne. Cleopatra went with Caesar to Rome and lived
in one of his palaces.

After Caesar’s death a power struggle broke out between
his friend Mark Antony. Mark Antony had fallen for Cleopatra and they started a
relationship. She helped him in his war against Octavian. In the end,
she bore three children for Mark Antony.

The moral here is that all princesses and queens are in a position to play for power. But if like, Cleopatra, they are smart and
beautiful too, they can leverage it over rivals for the throne. In a sense,
then, it is the shortsighted who see only good looks in beautiful women.

Of course, there’s a more direct reason to keep girls alive—in the fertile
grasslands of Africa, labour was the major constraint to how much you could
farm, land was plentiful. Therefore controlling people was more important than
controlling territory; having more wives meant having more children, and more hands to work.

But beauty is only an advantage when there is already enough
to eat; though there isn’t much research we could find to this, it follows from the above that beautiful girls made an (already prosperous) in an unstable neighbourhood to better survive
conflict.

What malaria has to do with

There’s
one more card Africa’s beauty deck—malaria. Sonia Shah’s brilliant book
The Fever outlines how throughout history, malaria has
shaped human settlement, economic activity and prosperity. In modern times it
has been shown to depress GDP growth by 1.3% per year, and in times past, the
effect could have been much greater.

Although much of Africa is
malaria-endemic,
it isn’t uniformly so. Malarial parasites needs warm weather,
abundant rainfall and stagnant water to survive, so the Horn of Africa and much
of the Sahel is too dry to support malaria, while high altitudes in the Ethiopian
highlands and the Rwenzori ranges are too cool for the deadly disease—thus we
see our “most beautiful countries” largely escaping the malarial dragnet.

So a ranking of the most beautiful, especially women, in Africa actually gives us important insights in the continent’s history, how geography shaped certain needs and allowed the traits necessary for phyical survival to be nurtured and become more dominant.

So here’s
how to rig the genetic lottery to have more beautiful women: don’t live in the
rainforest, have enough grain and meat to eat, get rich, and get rid of
mosquitoes. Now you know.